Creative adventures with colour and the landscape

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Plaid Diary

Following on from our seminar on Monday, Alexa commented that one of my paintings reminded her of Tartan.

This seemed quite interesting to me, due to my current obsession with plaid. I just love the way that the colours interplay in the knitted items I’m making – and how the variegated yarn throws up unexpected results.

I wondered what would happen if I tried to paint a ‘plaid’ from one of the days of my colour diary. I randomly opened a month on my machine and found a page to test (which is quite like the mint windcheater I made). I tried seeing how I could recreate the plaid pattern on this by making slabs and lines and blocks. As I adjusted and changed these I took more and more snapshots of the stages, as each threw up really interesting interactions and movements within the colours.

Of course these are totally reminiscent of Bridget Riley – and are taken directly from my colour diary in order – adjusting the width of the bands from left to right. The order has then run from bottom to top in thinner ‘woven’ sections.